People

Project: Linking diet and coloration using stable isotopes

Kade is studying how urbanization influences Anna’s Hummingbird (Calypte anna) diet and coloration. He predicts that variation in diet of hummingbirds across an urban gradient may lead to changes in feather coloration. Specifically, he is measuring insect abundance at sites across an urban gradient to estimate protein availability, and then measuring stable isotopes of N and C in feathers to see if there is a reduction in dietary protein. He will then use spectrophotometry to link diet to to feather coloration. 

Project: Gene expression and thermal stress responses in the Rufous-tailed Hummingbird

We are using transcriptomics to investigate the molecular mechanisms that support thermal resilience in the Rufus-tailed hummingbird, an urban-adapted tropical species. Specifically, we predict that urban and non-urban populations will vary in heat shock protein expression, reflecting physiological adjustment or local adaptation to chronic urban heat exposure.

Olivia Weklar
Ph.D. Student, New York University

Project: What is the link between variations in diet, microbiome composition, and thermal tolerance?

Collaborators: Dr. Kristin Winchell, Dr. Alejandro Rico-Guevara

Olivia Weklar is a Ph.D. student interested in how urbanization affects the gut microbiome of birds. We are currently collaborating to investigate the link between diet, gut microbiome, and thermal tolerance in urban hummingbird species in Puerto Rico and Panama. We are also working on a project to document hummingbird micriobiome diversity across 11 species found at el Centro de Investigación Colibri Goriazul in Fusagasugá, Colombia. 

Resulting publications: Weklar et al., 2025 

Fallon Meng
Ph.D. Student, Winchell Lab, New York University

Collaborators:  Dr. Kristin Winchell, Dr. Brent Sinclair 

The spotted lanternfly is an invasive moth that has been expanding its range rapidly across the Eastern United States, posing an agricultural threat, and is especially common in cities. Ph.D. student Fallon Meng and I are conducting a study to determine whether the metabolic rate of spotted lanternflies might be changing as a mechanism for coping with urban heat, and how this might be facilitating their invasion.  Fallon received a competitive grant grant from the Society for Experimental Biology in 2025 and is graduating in Spring 2027. 

Project: How is urbanization affecting hummingbird morphology and coloration?

Tamia participated in the New York University Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP), which was part of an NSF ETAP. She used spectrophotometry to measure coloration in the feathers of Puerto Rican Mangos - a species of hummingbird that has colonized both urban and forested environments in Puerto Rico. We found that urban populations have higher levels of UV reflectance in their tail feathers, and had longer tail feathers overall. Tamia presented this work in a poster at the SURP Undergraduate Research Symposium, and the Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minoritized Scientists (ABRCMS). This work also became her senior capstone project.

Current position: Graduate student at Stonybrook University

Saimara Alejandro
M.Sc. Student, SUNY Buffalo

The Bogert effect, or behavioral inertia, describes how behavior may enable organisms to reduce the amount of variation in their environment that they experience, thereby relaxing selective pressure on physiological traits. Saimara Alejandro, post-baccalaureate student from the University of Puerto Rico, led a camera trap study this past summer in Puerto Rico to determine whether hummingbirds might be shifting their behavior to avoid extreme temperatures in the city.

Saimara just started a masters degree at SUNY Buffalo in the lab of Marcella Baez, where she will be continuing to build on the dataset we collected, looking into the evolution of speciation and doing an assembly of the Puerto Rican Mango Genome!

During my doctorate I studied how light pollution disrupts circadian rhythms in birds. To do this, we occasionally had to stay awake for 24 hours, to get a snapshot of what was going on inside of a bird’s brain at all hours of the night. Spoiler alert - not getting enough sleep stresses birds out, and staying up all night to document it stresses us out too! Thankfully, I had some amazing undergraduate students and we got creative, finding ways to keep ourselves awake and in a good mood, like painting and making silly over-caffeinated videos. Pictured here: Kyra Moore, Ryan Fung, Makenna Buckmeyer, Nathan Gonclaves.